ARTISTS & arts events

Cinema Verde partners with ArtWalk each year to create Eco-Art Walk in conjunction with our festival. This year, EcoArt Walk will occur on our Opening Night, Feb. 24, and Cinema Verde has created a gallery at Villa East, where we are pleased to exhibit works by some of our favorite outstanding artists who specialize in environmentally themed works, alongside submission from area schoolchildren whose artwork we invite you to help us celebrate. Many of the artists whose work will be featured this year will be on hand with us during EcoArt Walk, so please come by to meet them and learn more about their amazing work.

David Montgomery

David Montgomery joins us again from Fernandina Beach, bringing his fascinating stop-motion photography to Cinema Verde just as he did in our inaugural year, when we cast his lovely images of flowers blooming and pollinating on a stately downtown edifice. This year his work will dance with light in the streetside windows of Villa East, inviting passersby to join Cinema Verde inside. “Most animators draw their films frame by frame or model and animate them using 3D software. I collect, grow, and scavenge my frames. Subtle differences (genetic variability) between one frame or specimen and the next create hypnotic, pulsing motion. I imagined that since the imagery for my films already existed and didn’t have to be created from scratch I’d discovered some clever shortcut in the animation process. I hadn’t. The flatbed scanner I use to create the grainy, surrealist images can take up to 20 minutes to complete a 2400 dpi pass. I spend weeks, sometimes months, in After Effects arranging and correcting thousands of images. My process is just as tedious as any of the more traditional forms of animation. Conveniently though, common plants and weeds like Oxalis pes caprae, Medicago polymorpha, Salvia lyrata, Lamium purpureum, or Ipomoea cairica are little films growing right outside my front door.”

Lorelei Esser

“I see my present work as a Display of the Sustainable Spirit. Creating form from energy that has been dormant, lost or fallen from an animal or tree, from the sea, washed up and breaking down, man-made materials left behind to rust, rot, or wear away, making its way, rock to grain, to the eternal. These things that we see as lifeless are in a constant state of change and gradual movement. I gather wood, stone, plastic, metal, glass, paper, rubber, peeled paint, any material that I can read into the story. I design by form and find, and I am amazed at what is revealed in the process, the energy has come together from the memory of what once was, a purpose, a sentimental journey, an attachment to us.”

J. Henry Fair

J. Henry Fair, a Manhattan-based artist who specializes in disturbingly beautiful aerial photos of industrial contamination sites, brings 20 pieces of artwork for display at Cinema Verde. “My work is a response to my vision of society. I see our culture as being addicted to petroleum and the unsustainable consumption of other natural resources, which seems to portend a future of scarcity. My vision is of a different possibility, arrived at through careful husbandry of resources and adjustment of our desires and consumption patterns toward a future of health and plenty. To gear our civilization toward sustainability does not necessitate sacrifice today, as many naysayers would argue, but simply adjustment. There are many societies existing at present that have a standard of living at least as high as ours while consuming and polluting a fraction of what is the norm in the United States. As an artist with a message, one asks oneself: how do I translate my message to my medium such that it will effect the change I want? At first, I photographed “ugly” things; which is, in essence, throwing the issue in people’s faces. Over time, I began to photograph all these things with an eye to making them both beautiful and frightening simultaneously, a seemingly irreconcilable mission, but actually quite achievable given the subject matter. These are all photographs of things i have found in my explorations. Other than standard photographic adjustments of contrast, they are unmodified.”

Margaret Ross Tolbert

Local artist and film director Margaret Ross Tolbert will display her paintings and has submitted short films to be screened at Cinema Verde which have been shown in Miami, Orlando, Tampa and Stockholm. The film “Sirena Rediviva” will be premiered in a new form for the first time ever during Cinema Verde. “Cinema Verde will be screening several short films about Sirena Rediviva, the semi-mythological denizen of Florida springs. These films, created with the help of photographer Tom Morris, provide documentation of glimpses of Sirena as she revels in the stunningly clear blue waters of Gilchrist Blue, Fanning, Troy, Alexander, Ichetucknee and Telford Springs, all here in our local region. Rarely seen footage shows Sirena exploring the springs, and whimsically bowling, clearing out hydrilla with swordplay, and offering roses to her beloved springs.”

John Moran

Renowned local photographer John Moran has also provided some of his incredible work to be displayed during the Eco-Art Walk. Moran’s photos feature the natural beauty of our local environment. John Moran’s work celebrates the magic of a unique landscape born of water and blessed with beauty beyond measure. He specializes in photographing the best of vanishing natural Florida. His portfolio of landscape and wildlife photography ranges from the Gulf to the Atlantic with an emphasis on Florida waters: the rivers, lakes, coasts, swamps and springs, and the creatures that inhabit them. A sampling of Moran’s work is compiled in his book, Journal of Light: The Visual Diary of a Florida Nature Photographer, a 20-year collection of photos and essays.